ZODL founder says Zcash’s original node software zcashd has officially retired

ZODL founder Josh Swihart said zcashd, the original official node software for Zcash, has stopped receiving maintenance as planned at block height 3,417,100. In his post, Swihart said the Zcash network continues running without interruption on Zebra and Zakura, two modern Rust-based node implementations, while the Zallet wallet has replaced the zcashd wallet. He wrote that blocks are still being produced, but the original software that gave life to Zcash has now formally retired after running for 10 years. zcashd began as a fork of Bitcoin Core v0.11.2 and launched the Zcash network on Oct. 28, 2016. According to the post, it marked the first large-scale production deployment of zk-SNARKs and served as an experiment in whether zero-knowledge cryptography could secure real value on a public blockchain. Swihart also said every network upgrade in Zcash history was carried out through zcashd, from Sprout, Overwinter and Sapling to later releases including Blossom, Heartwood and Canopy, as well as NU5 and the Orchard pool, before its retirement ahead of Ironwood.